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Ed.D. Program Partners

Center for Strong Schools

The Center's Mission: Sustainable change in schools and communities so every child is a whole child - engaged, successful, resilient, and ready for life.

The Center for Strong Schools, founded by Professor Dr. Gregory J. Benner, is a program of the University of Washington Tacoma, an urban-serving University deeply invested in its local communities. UW Tacoma is dedicated to innovative teaching and scholarship and to creating community-based mutually beneficial partnerships. The Center strives to embrace the University's core values of excellent, community, diversity, and innovation.

Race and Pedagogy Initiative

The Race and Pedagogy Initiative (RPI) at the University of Puget Sound (UPS) is rooted in organized, ongoing campus discussions on teaching and race since 2002, and since 2005 with community partners. The Race and Pedagogy National Conference in 2006, and the second in 2010, welcomed participants from across the United States and beyond, representing more than 100 institutions, including liberal arts colleges, primary and secondary schools, community colleges, regional state institutions, research universities, and a range of civic and government organizations. Between conferences, RPI continues the challenging work of translating critical engagement into pedagogical practices in the classroom at UPS and beyond, as they continue to address the challenge of preparing students who are critically engaged, aware, imaginiative, accountable, and able to function both as national and international citizens in a world of differences and disparities.

A significant feature of RPI's work is the generative role of the Community Partners Forum. Since 2005, the Forum, consisting of more than 50 persons, representing various community constituencies, meets as often as biweekly, as special events draw near, to work on modeling participatory pedagogoical processes of adult and popular education employed, for example, by the notable Highlander School. RPI's community partners think-through, learn more about, chart and hone program priorities, which directly concern and live at the intersections of race, education, and social justice.